George Nader, a key witness in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for bringing a teenage boy to the United States for sex and possessing child pornography.
Nader, a 61-year-old Lebanese American lobbyist, pleaded guilty in January and received 10 years for each charge on Friday. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia said they could be served concurrently.
The hearing took place in a socially-distanced federal courtroom with yellow X’s on the courtroom benches keeping the scattering of people in the audience spaced out from one another in the mostly empty room.
Search warrants unsealed last year revealed the FBI found child pornography in Nader’s possession during the Russia investigation. The warrants alleged that at least a dozen videos containing child pornography were found on his phones — some involving animals and boys as young as 2 years old.
Nader was also accused of taking a 14-year-old boy from the Czech Republic to his Washington, D.C., home in 2000 and using him for sex. Two years later, Czech authorities arrested Nader amid allegations that he had sex with underage boys in the Czech Republic between 1999 and 2002. He was convicted in May 2003 of molesting children, according to the search warrants.
When law enforcement in the U.S. learned of the 14-year-old boy in 2002, Nader had left the country.
Brinkema ruled Friday that Nader must now pay $150,000 in restitution to the victim, who called in to the proceedings and read a statement in Czech, which was repeated in English by a translator.
Nader also pleaded guilty to a federal pornography charge in 1991 and was sentenced to six months in prison after he was found with two reels of videotape hidden in candy tins when he arrived at the Washington-Dulles International Airport.
Both the Justice Department and Nader’s defense team had worked out a plea agreement in which Nader would be sentenced to 10 years for...
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